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Cybersquatting

NewYorkNewYork.com Decision: Owner Loses Domain Name + $101,000 Judgment

Elliot Silver
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49

The domain name NewYorkNewYork.com appears to be a completely generic geographic domain name, since New York City is known as New York, New York. However, New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas had a major issue with the usage of the domain name, a hotel booking engine that allegedly had its photo on the homepage at one point, and they filed a lawsuit in November of 2009.

The Las Vegas Sun has reported that the lawsuit was won by this MGM Resorts-owned hotel/casino, and the penalty is pretty severe for the domain owner. A $101,000 judgment was issued for violating the Anti Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), and the domain name is now owned by New  York  New  York  Hotel  &  Casino,  LLC, although it currently resolves to a Network Solutions under construction page for me for some reason.

The ACPA calls for penalties of up to $100,000 per domain name that is in violation. This is harsh for two reasons. First, the owner probably didn’t make nearly that much money over the course of his ownership, although that is just a guess. Second, the domain name could have been used as a geographic domain name with a New York City focus, and it would have some aftermarket value. Further, it could have generated revenue by adding a hotel booking engine/widget on the site, although many people probably directly navigated hoping to find the Vegas property.

In my opinion, had the domain owner used the domain name to promote New York City (or to pay homage to the City), he would have been in the clear. He probably also could have used the domain name to book hotels in New York City as well. However, because of his alleged usage of trademarks owned by MGM and its property, he was found to have violated the ACPA, and was penalized.

MichaelJacksonCasino.com Center of $100 Million Godaddy Lawsuit

Elliot Silver
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7

MichaelJacksonCasino.comLate last week, TMZ reported that the estate of Michael Jackson was not happy over an online casino being run on MichaelJacksonCasino.com. Apparently someone thinks it’s a good idea to run a casino, sportsbook, and poker room using Michael Jackson’s likeness allegedly without the permission of Michael Jackson’s Estate (this is according to the Estate).

The domain name MichaelJacksonCasino.com has been registered at Godaddy since May of 2005 (on its current registration), and the listed registrant seems to be a company called Corp. Hostarica, with a Miami post office box. Hostarica appears to be an offshore hosting company from Costa Rica, according to its website.

Early this morning, TMZ followed up their original article with another report that Godaddy is being sued for $100,000,000 by the man who claims to own copyrights to some of the photographs that are used on the MichaelJacksonCasino.com website. According to the article, a federal lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles on Monday August 2, and Mann hopes the lawsuit will cause Godaddy to reveal the name of the actual owner of the domain name.

According to results from the Wayback Machine on Archive.org, it looks like there has been a casino on MichaelJacksonCasino.com since 2006. Michael Jackson was still alive at that point, and the welcome message on the site said,

“The King of Pop is proud to bring you the most exciting Vegas style online gaming experience on the Net! Along with implementing the most advanced casino software in the industry, Michael Jackson Casino gives you 24-hr. customer support and guarantees you the highest level of security to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of your account. All you have to worry about is winning!”

Additionally, the Wayback Machine shows that the domain name was initially registered as far back as 2002, although the current registration began in 2005. It’s likely that the domain owner dropped this domain name and it expired sometime between 2003 and 2005. Interestingly, in 2003 (which is before the current domain registration), there was a page that said, “Visit our Internet Casinos” with a long list of other casino websites with generic domain names listed.

I don’t know how much exposure Godaddy would have in a case like this, where they acted as the registrar. To me, it looks like Godaddy is not actually hosting the website, as the DNS show nx0.dnscrservices.info and nx1.dnscrservices.info, which are Hostarica’s servers, and they are probably located outside of the US due to US gaming laws.

Thanks to Josh Pelissero for the tip.

Verizon Changes Tactics: Files UDRP Complaints Instead of Lawsuits

Elliot Silver
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5

Verizon is known to fiercely protect it’s trademarks, and they’ve done so using the US Court system in the past. In 2008 Verizon filed lawsuits against companies like Navigation Catalyst and OnlineNic citing the Lanham Act (cybersquatting ).

With its litigious reputation, I was surprised to see that the company opted to file UDRP disputes at the World Intellectual Property Organization, in lieu of filing lawsuits. As of the present time, Verizon has at least two UDRP complaints pending and a recent victory for domain names that include (among others):

  • verizoin.com
  • verizonswireless.com
  • verizonwieless.com
  • verizoon.com
  • verizopn.net
  • versizon.net
  • vewrizon.net
  • virazon.com
  • verion.com

Filing a lawsuit can be an expensive endeavor, and while federal law dictates that penalties up to $100k for each domain name may be given, the fact that respondents do not appear to be US-based may have been the rationale for using this mediation procedure rather than filing suit.

As mentioned above, Verizon won a $30+ million default judgment against OnlineNic, although it is unclear if they have been able to, or will be able to collect on this amount. Perhaps they’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not worth the time and/or effort to chase after cybersquatters in other countries. I really don’t know, but whatever the case is, Verizon remains on the hunt for potentially infringing domain names.

It is surprising to see Verizon filing UDRPs but it might make the most sense given the situation.

Buying .CO Domains for Typo Traffic

Elliot Silver
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56

As one would expect, there are many people who are buying .CO domain names with the hopes of capitalizing on typo traffic. These people are looking through Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and other various traffic estimation tools in the hopes of purchasing .CO domain names that will get traffic intended for the .COM.

One thing people need to be cognizant of (aside from trademark issues which I am not going to discuss) is that many high traffic websites get significant search engine traffic, and there isn’t going to be leakage from that. If someone visits a website via search engine or other referral, there will be no leakage to the .CO unless the referrer makes the typo.

Yesterday evening, I was asked if I had an interest in Burbank.CO. A reader of my blog offered his position in the auction because I didn’t back order it, and I wasn’t interested. I’ve been very fortunate with SEO and referral traffic for that site, and at the present time, only about 14% of the traffic is from type-in.   Assuming 20,000 visitors per month total, that means under 3,000 are typing it in to their browser.   If .3% of this traffic typos it, that’s about 9 visitors a month that I am losing.   It just doesn’t make that much sense to pay more than $500, which is where this name ended I believe.

There are a number of .CO websites that are live, where the .COM website is also live. Sex.com/Sex.co, Porn.com/Porn.co, Porno.com/Porno.co, Hotels.com/Hotels.co, and Weather.com/Weather.co are five such comparisons you can do, as I would imagine these sites rely on significant type-in traffic, which is where the leakage would take place. Since I don’t know how long each .CO has been live, I can’t say whether it’s 100% accurate, but here are the Compete numbers and % of traffic:

  • Sex.com – 135,793 | Sex.co – 393 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .23%
  • Porn.com – 1,807,569 | Porn.co – 1,015 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .056%
  • Porno.com – 233,909 | Porno.co – 656 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .28%
  • Hotels.com – 4,822,172 | Hotels.co – 1,698 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .035%
  • Weather.com – 31,992,990 | Weather.co – 29,893 – .CO % of .COM traffic: .093%

As you can see, there isn’t much leakage to the .CO, so investing a lot of money with the intent only to capitalize on typo traffic isn’t smart. Of course .CO domain owners can (and many will) develop their .CO domain names like I am doing, however, relying on revenue from typo traffic here might not be a smart play.

BlogSport.com: Is Yahoo Typosquatting Google’s Blogger Platform?

Elliot Silver
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1

Google BlogspotYou’ll Never Guess Whose Making Money on This Frequently Visited Typo URL

There are plenty of times when I “fat finger” a url and end up on a website I had no intention to visit. We all do it. Oftentimes, these typo domain names are owned by typosquatters who place pay per click links on the landing page, with the hopes of making money from this traffic.

This morning, I went to visit a popular blog hosted on Google’s Blogger platform. These websites generally are formatted with a url similar to this: blogname.BlogSpot.com. When I visited the blog this morning, the page didn’t load, so I double checked that I had the correct domain name. I didn’t. Instead I had blogname.BlogSport.com.

I did a quick Whois search to see who owns the domain name, and I was very surprised to see that Yahoo owns BlogSport.com while Google owns its flagship BlogSpot.com.

You might ask yourself how this happened. It’s somewhat interesting, so I will briefly explain. Sometime between September and October 2005, BlogSport.com was acquired by the owner of Rivals.com. In June of 2007, Rivals.com was acquired by Yahoo, and they presumably acquired all of the assets of Rivals.com, which included the BlogSport.com domain name.

Today, BlogSport.com sits idle, as Yahoo isn’t monetizing or forwarding the domain name, presumably because they know that Google might take action if they did.   According to Alexa, over 10 million people visit Google’s BlogSpot a month. There must be thousands of people who accidentally visit Blogsport.com a month, intending to visit a blog or website on the Blogger service.

So whose making money on this valuable typo domain name? Presumably the Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast who monetize error landing pages “helping” web browsers who accidentally type-in an invalid domain name. It’s very kind of them to do this for us.

Using Trademarks in Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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7

I was searching Google for an accessory for a new Apple product, and I was surprised at the number of domain names that included Apple trademarks. Since receiving a cease and desist letter from a company several years back when I first started buying domain names, I have been very careful not to buy   domain names that contain obvious trademarks.

I believe many domain investors look at this and wrongly believe that the seemingly free usage of trademark domain names means that the trademark owner doesn’t care about protecting its marks, and domain investors can buy and sell them with limited risk. Although the risk may in fact be low for many trademark domain names, the penalty can be very high – up to $100,000 per domain name according to the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.

Apple may not be a company that appears to actively litigate for infringing domain names, but there are plenty of companies that do – like Microsoft. When thinking about buying these domain names, especially when the sole purpose is resale, you should consider the legal repercussions.

There are plenty of people and companies that make business decisions every day because they own revenue generating domain names that contain trademarks, but newly minted domain investors probably have a much lower chance at hand registering TM names that will produce revenue. If you own a TM name that doesn’t make money, you have a liability rather than an asset.

I know Rick talked about registering BP spill-related domain names that generate PPC revenue, but keep in mind that Rick can afford to fight a legal battle if necessary. It’s the cost of doing business. Others who try to emulate this type of registration may not be so lucky. There are plenty of companies and lawyers who would like to make an example out of someone.

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